Liberal Hypocrisy Watch

I know, a true catalogue of liberal hypocrisy would run longer than War and Peace, before breakfast. But sometimes you need to take note of especially egregious instances.

So notice, for example, that while liberals are demanding increased background checks for gun purchases, Obama’s nominee for secretary of labor, Tom Perez, opposes allowing employers with federal contrasts to use background checks for new prospective employees. Ken Masugi is on the case in the Washington Examiner. Of course, there’s an obvious remedy for this problem: a company can require that every new employee buy a gun as a condition of hiring. (Or at least make every new employee work one day’s shift on security, which might also trip a background check requirement.) Problem solved!

Meanwhile, Paul mentioned here the other day the non-coverage of the Gosnell abortionist murder trial here the other day, perhaps the most blatant example of a media double-standard since the Watergate era. It appears, however, that the conservative blogosphere has shamed some of the mainstream media into changing course. John Nolte at Breitbart has the details.

But this does provide an occasion for an overdue note on a related aspect of Republican political malpractice. Liberals and the media are still dining out on Rep. Todd Akin’s famous face-plant about “legitimate rape” that, in conjunction with Richard Mourdoch’s similar mis-step in Indiana, didn’t just cost the GOP two winnable Senate seats, but might have cost them the Senate and the presidential election as well. The competent answer to that question in a political campaign, of course, would have been to go on the attack, with a line of reasoning that goes something like this: “I notice that you pro-abortion reporters so in the bag for the abortion industry that you have to default to the most extreme case in order to defend your friends, and never ask ‘pro-choice’ politicians about the extreme cases on their side. Please tell me how many times you or anyone else in the media has ever asked Barack Obama why he voted in favor of infanticide when he voted against Illinois’s ‘Infants Born Alive Protection Act,’ the same kind of statute that is at the root of the prosecution of Dr. Gosnell in Philadelphia that you’re also ignoring right now.”

I am not aware of any reporter that at any time ever asked Obama why he supports infanticide. The FactCheck.org people have to go to great contortions to try to defend Obama’s position, but are utterly unconvincing. The federal version of the Infants Born Alive Protection Act passed the House of Representatives with only 15 No votes, which means it was only opposed by abortion extremists. But for the media, “abortion extremists” only exist on the right.